St. John Chrysostom

St. John Chrysostom was born around 349 in Antioch, one of the great cities of the Roman East. Raised by his widowed mother, Anthusa, he studied rhetoric under the celebrated pagan orator Libanius before turning to an ascetic Christian life, spending several years as a monk and hermit in the mountains near Antioch until the severity of his penances broke his health. Returning to the city, he was ordained a deacon in 381 and a priest in 386, and for a dozen years his sermons — clear, practical, fearless expositions of Scripture, including his famous homilies during the riot of the statues in 387 — made him the most admired preacher of his age. Later generations gave him the name Chrysostom, "golden-mouthed." In 398 he was taken, almost against his will, to be Archbishop of Constantinople, the imperial capital. There he preached the same demanding Gospel he had preached in Antioch: he cut the luxuries of the episcopal household, funded hospitals for the poor, disciplined lax clergy, and denounced the extravagance of the wealthy — including, as his hearers understood it, the imperial court. His integrity won him the people's love and the enmity of the powerful, above all the Empress Eudoxia and Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria. At the Synod of the Oak in 403 his enemies contrived his deposition, and after a brief recall he was exiled in 404 to remote Cucusus in Armenia. Ordered moved even farther, to Pityus on the Black Sea, the aging bishop was marched beyond his strength and died at Comana in Pontus on September 14, 407. Early accounts relate that his last words were "Glory to God for all things." Vindication came quickly. His relics were returned in triumph to Constantinople in 438, and he came to be honored in the East as one of the Three Holy Hierarchs and the namesake of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy still celebrated today. In the West he is venerated as a Doctor of the Church, a title formalized among the four great Eastern doctors. His feast in the Roman calendar is September 13, the eve of his death; relics long kept at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome were in part returned by St. John Paul II to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2004, a gesture of the communion this great pastor died serving.